Drop It In The Box
I’ve gotten a bit of time to try out Dropbox and so here’s my little review of it.
For the uninitiated, Dropbox is a web 2.0 application that lets you sync files between multiple computers quickly and painlessly. It also comes with a nifty web interface to organize your folders and content. Although this sort of technology isn’t exactly new (to those of us in computer science or just in the know with code repositories general), it certainly manages to be easy enough to use and maintains a good amount of flexibility.
Basically, after installing the Dropbox application, it creates a little folder where any file inside it will be automatically synced to folders on other computers that are linked to the same Dropbox account. The install process itself very straightforward and fast, and the application itself seems very lightweight and memory-friendly.
I’ve been using it for the past couple of weeks now, mainly for keeping things like photos, documents and guitar tabs synced across both my laptops. It excels at syncing your content very quickly between all linked Dropbox folders and updating the web interface. Since the Dropbox application (which runs constantly in the background) is set to check your folder at very frequent intervals, dropping your file in the folder results in an almost instantaneous sync between the folders on other computers. A neat little feature I’ve used a bit is that any file you put into the public section of the folder gets a download link associated with it, so that you can share links directly with friends to the content in that folder.
One of the features I’ve yet to fully investigate is the “shared” folder, where you can share a folder between multiple Dropbox users and have it set to sync to all of their folders. As well, I haven’t played around too much with revisioning changes to files, but I imagine it works just fine.
Ultimately, it’s a very neat little application to have and is a godsend to those of us who find repositories such as Subversion a little too complicated to set up. Much like Twitter, I think it becomes much more handy to have around when more of your friends are using it, however it is very usable if you just want to share files across multiple computers. Dropbox is currently in private beta and is invite only.
PS. I’ve written this entire entry using the Qumana blog editor, which is a pretty neat free Mac blog editor. Here’s hoping it looks good on the site!